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By Barbara Card Atkinson
Special to MSN TV
It's Halloween once again and TV is full of spooky characters. Monsters,
murderers, mayhem fill the airwaves. Some of it will be scary, while a lot
of it will really just come across as silly. And while some of the programming
will give our kids nightmares, other shows will trigger blasé yawns -- and it's
hard to know which will be which.
In talking with fellow parents across the country, we discovered that some of
the characters that scared us the most in childhood, the people or things that
really stayed with us and left an indelible (freaked out) mark, were not
necessarily the characters we, or our parents, would have expected.
Archie Bunker, "All in the
Family"
Sure, "All in the Family" wasn't a show written for a kid audience, but it
was often watched by parents and kids together, way back when families did that
sort of thing. Archie's blustering racial slurs and political rants were comedic
fodder, but all many children saw was a short, stocky, really angry grandpa. "I
remember wondering why the studio audience was laughing at what he said, when he
was so furious," recalls 40-something mom Judy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone said
that Archie was the inspiration for Eric Cartman on "South Park." Exactly. One
tantrum away from popping your head off like a bottle rocket is cute, if you're
an 8-year-old -- and a cartoon.
Which TV character did you find to be the scariest? Share with us on MSN
TV on Facebook and Twitter.
George Jefferson, "The Jeffersons"
"He was so obnoxious and aggressive," remembers Ginger, an editor in San
Francisco. "I hated that he called his wife 'Weezy' and was always yelling at
someone." And even when it wasn't George (Sherman Hemsley) acting up, someone
else was. For St. Louis writer Angela, it was the overly eager, socially
clueless Brit Harry Bentley (Paul Benedict) who made her anxious.
Why was he so obsessed with getting George to walk on his back? "He seemed so
unpredictable and crazy to me," says Angela. "I always felt very uneasy when he
made an appearance."
Sanford, "Sanford and
Son"
"Probably the scariest person on TV when I was little was the Redd Foxx
character on 'Sanford and Son,'" says John, a Baltimore dad. "Why did he live
with so much junk? He was creepy, dissipated and mean. Every room was dirty and
filled with rusted metal -- and he was always about to die. The show freaked me
out." He was scary to New York-based information specialist Barbara G., too. (Story Continues On Next Page...)
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